https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Dg-g7t2l4 “The Sound of Silence” Is the Most Metal Song of the Past Decade”: imagine that headline, and the contrarian culture piece practically writes itself. Not so long ago, Slate was notorious for publishing that kind of thing, but it...
When the Romans pushed their way north into the German provinces, they built (circa 90 AD) the Saalburg, a fort that protected the boundary between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribal territories. At its peak, 2,000 people lived in the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxY3CzN2Kkc As Mike Tyson once put it, with characteristic straightforwardness, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Back in the time of the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, all of Rome’s enemies must have...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIDzA0YDso8 Welsh crooner Tom Jones made an unlikely comeback in the late 80s, covering Prince’s “Kiss” with Art of Noise. Then in the mid-90s, he showed up on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to sing the mid-60s hit “It’s...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ZMhhquL8c If you happen to go to the Louvre to have a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll find that you can’t get especially close to it. That owes in part to the ever-present crowd of cellphone photographers,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1fiOJDXA-E Combining pop music with opera was always the height of pretension. But where would we be without the pretentious? As Brian Eno observed in his 1995 diary, “My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8dcnh-4I6g Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is a “house museum,” first designed as a residence, and now open to the public. In fact, as the institution’s director Justin Gunther explains in the Open Space video above, it’s “the first house of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIqXprCArdo Miles Davis didn’t put out any studio albums from 1973 until the middle of 1981. In explaining the reasons for this lacuna in his recording career, Milesologists can point to a variety of factors in the man’s professional and...
Hōshi, a traditional Japanese inn in Komatsu, Japan, holds the distinction of being the second oldest hotel in the world—and “the oldest still running family business in the world.” Built in 718 AD, Hōshi has been operated by the same family...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmvxRMYxlhE Most tourists in Rome put the Colosseum at the top of their to-see list. (My own sister-in-law, soon to head out on her Italian honeymoon, plans to head to that storied ruin more or less straight from the airport.)...
